Sharkiy lost a leg below the knee fighting in the Donbas. He put the matter plainly afterwards: "I've got one leg in the Donbas, the other on the Fashion Week runway." Of the clothes themselves he was practical — loose enough to move over a prosthesis, and, he said, comfortable while still being stylish. He now wants to start his own label for amputees.
The collection, "Woven by Nature", came from Igor Sidletskiy, a 27-year-old designer whose conceptual label has existed only since 2020. What made this show different from an ordinary adaptive-clothing presentation were the prosthetic covers, shown for the first time: shells carrying the same natural motifs as the textiles, made not in the studio but by Timelapse, a company founded by Hlib Bieshkariev, another former combat medic. One medic built the covers; another wore them.
Over there, we had to destroy. Here we create.
That was Mykola Kovalyov, 22, who lost both legs near Sumy. He added that the show was art, and that art gives back a resource the war takes away. Olga Dolga, 30, walked too. She is not a soldier. She lost her leg when a Russian bomb struck a shop in Dobropillya, and she spoke about inclusivity because, as she put it, so many have lost limbs.
The casting came through a rehabilitation centre opened in Kyiv in 2023 by Oleksandra Mostepan, a surgeon who was working in a hospital in Monte Carlo when the full-scale invasion began, and who came home to operate. She has since performed surgery on many of her own centre's patients. It keeps prosthetic fitting, physiotherapy and psychological work under one roof instead of sending people from building to building, and it takes civilians as well as soldiers.
Ukrainian Fashion Week has its own history of interruption. Founded in 1997 by Iryna Danylevska, it ran twice a year until February 2022, when it stopped, and returned to Kyiv only in September 2024. Designers now show under air-raid conditions; venues are chosen partly for their shelter access.
What the organisers arranged was, in the end, a change of setting. These six people have spent the years since their injuries in clinics, in fitting rooms, in physiotherapy halls — rooms where a missing limb is the reason you are there. On the runway it was simply part of how they walked.